Chaos Magick - Impossible for Beginners?

Do you know that guy on YouTube that dresses as a janitor and walks around a gym with a 30 kg "mop"? He's an elite power lifter that lifts barbells with working set loads like they are sticks and pretends it is easy. Really funny stuff and if it is real, the guy is a beast.

That guy is chaos magick to me. It all looks easy, just immerse yourself in a belief system and manifest your will through working. But if you are not trained, it is an abstraction. What my point is - chaos magick is not for beginners. Even if you trained mental capabilities like visualisation and concentration, you still need some theory and some "moral" training to keep yourself in check...

Your thoughts? Can chaos magick work for a 1st time practitioner?

Chaos magick is in some sense a subversion of everything that came before it. Going into it without understanding what its subverting creates an unclear picture of things. That's not to say it can't be engaged with in a beneficial way, but doing so without having reference points may make things more confusing than they might otherwise be were you to begin with a more foundational system. I view it as an intermediate practice that one can begin to adopt once one has already established a reliable foundation.

I am curious about the answers and will watch this thread, because I first did 4 years of magic with good results before I read for the first time something theoretic. After reading that book I did put it aside and had a few more years of doing magic. (I think learning styles can be different, but I first make space for posts from other people)

Magpie said:

Do you know that guy on YouTube that dresses as a janitor and walks around a gym with a 30 kg "mop"? He's an elite power lifter that lifts barbells with working set loads like they are sticks and pretends it is easy. Really funny stuff and if it is real, the guy is a beast.

That guy is chaos magick to me. It all looks easy, just immerse yourself in a belief system and manifest your will through working. But if you are not trained, it is an abstraction. What my point is - chaos magick is not for beginners. Even if you trained mental capabilities like visualisation and concentration, you still need some theory and some "moral" training to keep yourself in check...

Your thoughts? Can chaos magick work for a 1st time practitioner?

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The elite guy didn't started with 20kg, probably with 1 - 3 kg. He is showing you many months of work, maybe even few years. If he is Chaos Magic to you, then you are looking at the 7th degree material, with out realizing that there are degrees before it that had to be done in order to do it effectively.

Of course beginner can work chaos magic. You just need to start right. Liber Null offers a template for banishing ritual that can fit any faith or any creative idea you want. I started more serious magic with exactly that and since I was interested in Tolkien at the time, I formed the ritual with names of the Valar. After months of daily practice I could use it for magic defense no problem.

Any magic school that has material usable for a beginner, can be used by beginner. And Liber Null does that for Chaos magic quite well.

Hmmm... I can relate, but from my very own perspective I must disagree.

My own journey started with chaos magick because after many years I finally realized I was basically practicing it all my life completely unaware of it. E.g. I was doing something very similar to the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, years before I came in touch with the original LBP.

Chaos magick resonated with me because it was free of dogmatism, and I was free to do my own thing. I mean, if nothing is true also nothing is wrong, right? There was no need for permission or acceptance from others. Everything I did was based on my intuition and creativity. I was already told in my everyday life what I had to do and to learn. So following a certain school of magick would have killed my passion entirely.

At the end it depends on the personal nature of the practitioner, I guess. If you like to study the ideas of others intensively or you struggle to come up with your own ideas or you need the reassurance of others, following strictly a certain path for some time surely helps. But when you are a quarreling heretic like me who always finds something to disagree in every belief or magical system, chaos magick is your thing!

Nevertheless, IMHO today's chaos magick suffers from a problem: it's branding. I get the impression it's always about being as anarchistic, chaotic, silly and unpretentious as possible for the sake of being chaotic. From my understanding after reading Peter Carroll, Phil Hine and the mighty Austin Osman Spare among others, the core idea of chaos magick is that all magick is based on one fundamental truth which can be followed in many ways, and you need to find your own way. It's not about abolishing all systems entirely, it's about finding a system that suits you and adjusting elements to make it a perfect fit for your practice. Take i.e. Aleister Crowley and Thelema. He literally took the Golden Dawn system and integrated his own ideas and experiences. To me this is the very essence of chaos magick.

To link this to your initial argument. I believe chaos magick can be a good entry point for beginners (as it was for me) but a beginner should always be open minded and curios about the history and philosophy of the Occult in general. Of course you need self-awareness and capability to question yourself. But this you also need when you travel a well-trodden path, or else you will fall prey to snake charmers and charlatans.

Magpie said:

That guy is chaos magick to me. It all looks easy

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Don't confound simple and easy, as they're two separated concepts. Chaos magick is simpler than some other currents in that it has less dogmas, you don't need to wear robes or to have a lot of tools made of specific materials. You have yourself, and that's all you need, unless you want to include some specific tool. But it's not necessarily easy.

Magpie said:

just immerse yourself in a belief system and manifest your will through working. But if you are not trained, it is an abstraction. What my point is - chaos magick is not for beginners. Even if you trained mental capabilities like visualisation and concentration, you still need some theory and some "moral" training to keep yourself in check...

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I'd argue chaos magick can definitely be for beginners, but magick itself is not for everyone. The fact that chaos magick is so grounded in results is a big plus for a newbie: you don't need to spend years working through the ranks of some old order and dusty tomes of theory before you can do magick hands-on. But it doesn't mean there isn't a least as much effort involved.

Magpie said:

Your thoughts? Can chaos magick work for a 1st time practitioner?

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Absolutely.

it was the first system I knew about. granted it gets a little bit muddy because as a meta-system you have to learn about other systems and do them in order to be doing chaos magick (even runesoup style sigils are, to my mind, their own microsystem separate from chaos). for me it ended with the first system i ever knew about being chaos, but the first system i ever worked was wicca-under-chaos, with the alan chapman idea that "you can make up a system if you want to but once you decide to work a system you have to work that system" in-place. What I was doing was cunningham solitary wicca, but why I was doing it was chaos magick.

Lot of very wise things in this thread (i.e. things I agree with )

It's the straightforwardness that attracted me. It was definitely the meta-idea of magic that resonated, and I found it super easy to approach.

But as @PracticingGeomancer kind of said: it's the simplicity that leaves you nothing to hide behind. You can't pretend you're a great mage just because you dress up in expensive robes and intone from expensive books. You do indeed have yourself. And you have only you to decide what you're going to do with that.

So yes, I was a beginner and I took to it like a duck to water. Then you discover how deep that water really is

I think Chaos magick appears easy because it strips the scaffolding of the old systems and tries to get to the bare bones of actual magick, then it gives the practitioner permission to do whatever they want to do with it. That freedom can seem overwhelming to some if they are used to seeing other practitioners spending a decade in a system with order and scaffolding. Neither are bad, just different.

That said, you can choose to overcomplicate things with your mind with Chaos magick. Many do, and that is a choice (whether intentional or not). Chaos magick, like every other system, has paradox, if you cannot hold paradox, any system in magick is going to be harder than it should be. Chaos just presents it much sooner.

@PracticingGeomancer nailed it by pointing out simple and easy as being two different things. Missing this will add to the frustration.

Thanks for insightful replies. Simple, but very hard to do, requiring lots of reps, with right technique, good nutrition and recovery - continuing that gym analogy. One other thing I can think of which would make it good for a beginner is that it is stripped of the mystique. So for someone who is just starting, which can be paired up with fear/paranoia, it can be sobering to read Liber Null.

Magpie said:

Your thoughts? Can chaos magick work for a 1st time practitioner?

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Yes. Doing IS the initiation and training. This is not to totally discount your considerations of visualization, concentration, theory and "moral" training but we have our own paths and karma and all of this is unveiled in the performance of magick, esp. chaos magick.

FireBorn said:

Chaos magick, like every other system, has paradox, if you cannot hold paradox, any system in magick is going to be harder than it should be. Chaos just presents it much sooner.

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I'm going to be naughty and say that it's only paradox if you don't understand it

And, as @FireBorn says, that's where the overcomplication comes in!

To quote Richard Feynman: “The 'paradox' is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality 'ought to be'.”

Robert Ramsay said:

I'm going to be naughty and say that it's only paradox if you don't understand it

And, as @FireBorn says, that's where the overcomplication comes in!

To quote Richard Feynman: “The 'paradox' is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality 'ought to be'.”

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You win sir, well played.

Robert Ramsay said:

To quote Richard Feynman

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Hell yeah, bringing in Feynman into a discussion about chaos magick! Could it be possible that Feynman himself was a chaos sorcerer all along?
I mean he really was into playing the bongos! That's pretty shamanic!

I just started to read Thumper Forge's book "The Chaos Apple". He is referring to himself as a "discordian witch" rather than a "chaos witch". That made me realize that there is a distinction between the more general ideas of chaos magick and the discordian current within it.

PracticingGeomancer said:

I'd argue chaos magick can definitely be for beginners, but magick itself is not for everyone.

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I think you made a fair point here. There are certainly people who are trying and are willing to believe that magic is an actual thing, but that doesn't make them a good performer. Even not when more experienced, not everyone gets their thoughts and energy aligned to each other in such a way that they can perform with succes. (I use here the word of performer/perform, but am al little bit in doubt if that is actually a good word for it)

The other thing you pointed out that simple and easy are not the same thing, is a very good observation too. There are a lot of people who are actually getting lost when things are simple and that is even the case in mundaine life.

Van Horne said:

H

From my understanding after reading Peter Carroll, Phil Hine and the mighty Austin Osman Spare among others, the core idea of chaos magick is that all magick is based on one fundamental truth which can be followed in many ways, and you need to find your own way. It's not about abolishing all systems entirely, it's about finding a system that suits you and adjusting elements to make it a perfect fit for your practice. T

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It shows that if one strips all the props, all the details, all the complicated thoughts, all the dogma down, that magic is just magic and that magic is highly functional. It shows that it is there before our eyes and in our bare hands, always and everywhere. And when one gets that, one can add details and props to feed the creativity and imagination. But if it is needed and when it is needed, the practitioner is the only one who knows that. That can make it to the perfect fit.

Van Horne said:

Hell yeah, bringing in Feynman into a discussion about chaos magick! Could it be possible that Feynman himself was a chaos sorcerer all along?
I mean he really was into playing the bongos! That's pretty shamanic!

I just started to read Thumper Forge's book "The Chaos Apple". He is referring to himself as a "discordian witch" rather than a "chaos witch". That made me realize that there is a distinction between the more general ideas of chaos magick and the discordian current within it.

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You could argue that Feynman was a magician because we all wrestle with the deepest level of reality

At risk of going off topic, I consider the chaos in chaos magic to be more aligned with the mathematical meaning of chaos, whereas the Discordians align themselves with the more usual meaning.

I consider Discordianism to be a very risky form of magic - basically you are opening yourself up to whatever the universe throws at you, and that could be anything, anything at all.

So to come back to topic, chaos for beginners, yes, Discordianism for beginners, no!

One of the things I did not stress enough (hidden behind vague theory and moral training concepts) is a key element of restructuring of self. Call it personal development if you will. Among others, it consists of dealing with detrimental ways of thinking or detrimental emotional patterns or mixtures of both. I call those "thought-forms". Chaos magick gives a how, but it doesn't give you a "safety briefing". E.g. if you attempt this with that shitty belief you hold, it is going to do nothing at best or it is going to backfire terrible at worst.

Which adds to a pattern I am starting to see - if someone is predisposed towards magick i.e. does not hold detrimental thought-forms and "gets" many magickal concepts intuitively, chaos magick cuts the fluff and gets right to the point, even if the person had no prior experience. But if someone need to do some serious work before any proper INTENTIONAL magick is done, chaos magick is either a cul-de-sack or an outright threat.

Magpie said:

Which adds to a pattern I am starting to see - if someone is predisposed towards magick i.e. does not hold detrimental thought-forms and "gets" many magickal concepts intuitively, chaos magick cuts the fluff and gets right to the point, even if the person had no prior experience. But if someone need to do some serious work before any proper INTENTIONAL magick is done, chaos magick is either a cul-de-sack or an outright threat.

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I think this is 100% correct. There are people who shouldn't be involving themselves in magic at all because of this. I would say, however, that for these people, there's no guarantee that any other magical system would work any better for them, or be any less dangerous. We had one guy write to the forum, tying himself up in all sorts of knots over what looked like a fairly straightforward ritual. Some people (including myself) advised him that perhaps magic was not for him.

Robert Ramsay said:

I think this is 100% correct. There are people who shouldn't be involving themselves in magic at all because of this. I would say, however, that for these people, there's no guarantee that any other magical system would work any better for them, or be any less dangerous. We had one guy write to the forum, tying himself up in all sorts of knots over what looked like a fairly straightforward ritual. Some people (including myself) advised him that perhaps magic was not for him.

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Or maybe it was not for him at that point in time. Maybe he could get somewhere in magick if he worked in himself first as a prep.

Magpie said:

Or maybe it was not for him at that point in time. Maybe he could get somewhere in magick if he worked in himself first as a prep.

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If it is about the person who was freaking over DKMU materials, then yeah, he has a lot to do on himself and on his own way of thinking before he can start with magic.

Honestly just like when we look at the muscular man again. If you look at just that and are not seeing all the effort that it takes, you don't see the whole picture or you refuse to see it and just say that it is impossible for you, which itself is self-sabotage of your magic thinking.